(a) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system and method for creating, presenting, and interacting with animated depictions of past sequences of events and/or of plans that changed over time, using a computer database and computer visualization. More particularly, but not by limitation, to a computer-implemented system for presenting time-sequenced events and associating these events with other events on a screen in order to aid the user in assimilating causes and effects among the events.
(b) Discussion of Known Art
A central aspect of modern business is the execution of projects, i.e. those organized activities with definite business goals and definite beginnings and endings. Projects encompass undertakings such as developing a new consumer-electronics product, creating a new financial service, upgrading a company's IT infrastructure, testing a new pharmaceutical product, pursuing litigation, launching a communications satellite, building a highway, and developing a new software product. Projects are often complex undertakings, with external dependencies, execution constraints, resource problems, scope changes, and the need to deal with unplanned events.
It is important for businesses to learn from previous projects in order to improve operational performance on future projects, but extracting usable knowledge and action plans from historical project data is challenging. The data is often voluminous, disorganized, and without context. Furthermore, people often have selective memories, forming their own interpretations of project histories and avoiding the exploration of alternative diagnoses. Finally, there is often the desire to proceed to the next project rather than to spend time analyzing what has already happened. This invention mitigates these problems by integrating project-history information into an animated retrospective context: an intuitive, interactive “movie” of the project's history, showing events that happened and how these may have affected the project's changing plans.
A related challenge of modern society is the need to investigate complex sequences of past events, looking for who is at fault, whether someone broke the law, or what caused something to go wrong. For example, law-enforcement investigators pursuing criminals must gather, filter, and establish relationships among sequences of phone calls, e-mails, memos, witness recollections, and transactions. Likewise, National Transportation Safety Board investigators must examine and relate complex sequences of human, mechanical, electrical, and meteorological events that preceded a plane crash. Litigation attorneys must collect large numbers of files, e-mails, phone records, and transactions to establish cause-effect relationships when building civil cases or defending against them. Just as in the case of project retrospectives, such activities involve looking back in time at plans that were in place and at events that occurred, trying to establish relationships among events and/or plans to persuasively support arguments about what really happened. And, as in the case of business projects, the challenges are the volume of data, its disorganization, and the lack of a unifying framework. This invention mitigates these challenges by integrating time-sequenced events and changing plans into a computerized, animated movie that makes it possible to see relationships among a large number of events and changing plans.
Current computer-based tools for collecting and managing time-sequenced project data include Microsoft® Office Project and its market competitors, such as SureTrak® Project Manager from Primavera Systems, Inc. Such tools allow users to build, track, and display project plans, times, dependencies and resources. However, a major limitation of such tools is their inability to display how plans changed as time passed. A second major limitation is that such tools do not easily handle the unplanned events that had an influence on the project outcome. A third major limitation of such tools is their difficulty in presenting large amounts of time-sequenced data in an easily comprehended fashion.
For the related problem of organizing time-dependent events onto a timeline for carrying out an investigation, there are some commercially-available software packages that are capable of producing static timelines. Static timelines display all the events at once, having no capability to sequentially display a limited time window of events to the viewer in animated fashion. One example is the software sold under the trademark TimelineProject from Timeline Studio (www.timelinestudio.co.uk). This tool focuses on producing static timelines annotated with text, markers, and images. It also allows the creation of a step-by-step guide to assembly of an object as the user advances along the timeline. Another example is the program sold under the trademark TimelineMaker Professional by Progeny Software, Inc. (www.timelinemaker.com). This software produces static timelines annotated with text, markers, and images.
Finally, there are several general-purpose software applications for creating presentation graphics, such as Microsoft® Office PowerPoint, Microsoft® Office Excel, Microsoft® Office Visio, IBM Freelance, Lotus 1-2-3, and Suite Edition by SmartDraw.com (www.smartdraw.com). These software packages allow users to create a wide variety of drawings, including static timelines that can be annotated with text, markers, and images.
Neither existing project-management software, static-timeline tools, nor the general-purpose presentation graphics solves the problem of presenting a large amount of time-dependent event data and its dependencies in a comprehensible manner. Nor can these approaches easily display the evolution of past plans as time progressed.
It is possible to combine drawing tools such as Microsoft® Office Visio with “slide show” tools such as Microsoft® Office Powerpoint to create an animated historical movie with some similarity to the movies produced in this invention. However, making such a movie is an arduous and error-prone manual process and does not permit the user to interact with an event database.
Therefore, a review of known systems reveals that there remains a need for a system that allows a user to organize time-sequenced event data, indicate purported relationships among events and plans, show changes in plans, and present both time-dependent event and plan data in an animated fashion in chronological order on a viewable screen.
There remains a need for a computer-implemented system or “software” system that provides tools for collecting, organizing, and presenting past events on a screen in an animated fashion.
There remains a need for a system that allows a user to organize time-sequenced event and plan data, present both time-dependent event and plan data in an animated fashion in chronological order on a viewable screen, and allow the user to pause the animated presentation in order to explore individual events, plans, and relationships among them in more detail.
There remains a need for a computer-implemented system that provides tools for displaying a more readily comprehensible subset of a large number of past events with the aid of a moving cursor, by displaying on the screen only those events whose times fall within a time window that contains the cursor.
There remains a need for a computer-implemented system that provides tools for collecting, organizing, and presenting the changes in past plans on a screen by displaying snapshots of the tasks in the plan at one time in the past and by changing from one snapshot to the next as a moving cursor advances across the screen to other times in the past.
There remains a need for a computer-implemented system that allows the creation and dissemination of a screen-viewable presentation of past events with the aid of a moving cursor that advances across the screen, highlighting markers representing time-windowed events in chronological order and associating an event with other events that purportedly had an effect on it while its marker is being highlighted.
There remains a need for a computer-implemented system that allows the creation and dissemination of a screen-viewable presentation of planned events with the aid of a moving cursor that advances across the screen, highlighting markers representing events that purportedly caused changes in the planned events from one snapshot to the next.